OpenAI expands in Europe with Zurich office

The startup said Zurich would be its fifth location in Europe after opening offices in Dublin, London, Paris and Brussels over the past two years. Mark Chen, senior vice president of research at OpenAI, said the company selected Zurich because the city had emerged as a key tech hub.

Microsoft, which invested $13.75 billion in OpenAI since 2019, including its share of the startup’s latest $6.6 billion fundraise, has a presence Zurich. Alphabet-owned Google also has an office there.

OpenAI started building a team in the city, poaching multimodal AI researchers Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai from Google DeepMind, the company’s AI research lab. They will start in a few weeks.

The move underscores efforts from OpenAI to expand its presence outside Silicon Valley in search for talent to build the technology that powers the models behind ChatGPT. The startup recently outlined plans to set up an office in Singapore to serve as a hub in the Asia-Pacific region.

In Europe, AI companies face pressure after lawmakers in March approved the world’s most comprehensive legislation yet on artificial intelligence. The rules, which are set to take effect gradually over several years, ban certain uses of the technology, roll out new transparency rules and require risk assessments for AI systems that are deemed high-risk.

OpenAI’s ties with Microsoft are currently under scrutiny in the UK, where antitrust officials launched a review in December last year to determine whether Microsoft’s investment and its partnership with the startup should be considered a de facto merger that might stifle competition in the country.

The European Union also scrutinized the partnership from a merger-control angle to determine whether Microsoft had acquired control on a lasting basis over OpenAI. The bloc’s antitrust regulators concluded that wasn’t the case, but said the EU would keep monitoring the relationship.

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Write to Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com